Chas Fagan has created artwork for every C-SPAN history series since 1997's Traveling Tocqueville's America. This unique oil portrait was commissioned by C-SPAN and painted by Mr. Fagan in honor of our new series, First Ladies: Influence and Image. The portrait presents four of our most notable first ladies, beginning with our earliest first lady, Martha Washington, and also includes Jacqueline Kennedy, Nancy Reagan, and our current First Lady Michelle Obama.

About the Artist:

A graduate of Yale University, Chas Fagan has gained national prominence and recognition as an accomplished and gifted portraitist, sculptor, and painter. In his landscape and still life paintings Fagan creates classic, yet energetic compositions, often juxtaposing delicate details with bold brushwork.

Since 2001, Fagan has received several commissions for statues designed specifically for the National Cathedral, in Washington D.C., as well as commissions for the U.S.S. Reagan, the city of Houston's Bush Monument, and Purdue University's engineering building named in honor of Neil Armstrong. In 2009, Fagan completed a bronze sculpture of President Ronald Reagan, which stands in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol in Washington, DC. Other high-profile commissions include the official White House Portrait of First Lady Barbara Bush, unveiled in January 2005, and the portrait of Speaker Thomas Foley, which hangs in the Capitol.

Recent portraits include Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Norman Borlaug, Secretary Don Evans, and former U.S. Attorney General and Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh. In the weeks prior to Inauguration Day 2009, Fagan created a new painting for his complete set of oil portraits of all the presidents which now tours the country with C-SPAN's exhibit, American Presidents: Life Portraits.